The best way to promote is visitors.

Spent on his website Dota Pick a small experiment to promote the site. The question was the following - the best source of natural links is the site visitors. It is they who read the materials on the site and then write about it on their blogs, forums, etc. But usually this source is relatively weak and in a few months from tens of thousands of visitors per month you can at best wait for 100-200 links. So is it possible to strengthen the work of visitors?

For the experiment, I used the following mechanism: visitors to the site were invited to post anywhere links to the site with a partner ID (such as dotapick.ru/node/91/?uidaf=30 ). All unique visitors by ip, who followed the links, were counted towards the forum member, plus reputation (which is a significant indicator of the visitor’s importance), and licensed game discs were promised as a gift (about 500 rubles with delivery; 200 rubles for electronic version).

What we got in the end for the month:

1) the number of participants of the action was 58 people
2) in total, 758 people (26 kopecks per visitor) were referred by links
3) the number of backlinks on Yandex for the month increased by 300, about half of which relate specifically to the action (which was determined from the analysis of the becks) - about 150 in total

')
Evaluating the positive and negative sides, it can be noted:
Positive

* A relatively easy way to get more or less relevant links. According to the analysis of the linking sites, it can be seen that backlinks were mostly placed on gaming and entertainment forums.
* relatively cheap visitors

Negative

* risk of spam. It can be expected that someone will start spamming this link by e-mail and will not end up with problems. Fortunately, in this experiment there was only 1 case when the link was placed in a relatively unfavorable place, but even in this case, it only came across the laughter of forum participants and the moderator did not remove the link
* the possibility of injustice due to deception by the participants. No one prevented participants from walking through proxy servers and entering through them. The problem was solved through regular analysis of backlinks.
* poor quality of incoming links from forums

Of course - affiliate programs are better, but we do not sell anything :). In my opinion, the result of the experiment is positive and I plan to strengthen it even more by making the action constant. Who can share this experience?